I'm building a 3D copying machine for my primary business, which is building guitars. I build them from scratch, and most are totally custom ordered and designed. But some orders are for more or less standard designs.
This copying machine is manually operated and operates on a tracer mill type principle. It runs on Thomson recirculating ball bearings in pillow blocks running on ground, hardened shafts, in X, Y, and Z axes, with a total workpiece capacity of 24 x 18 x 6 inches, with the option of extending the range by simply getting longer shafts and building the machine on a larger baseplate.
I've been looking, and hoping, to find something better than a piece of plywood or MDF to build this sucker on. The shafts and bearings alone would cost over a thousand dollars to buy new from MSC, and I paid just 20 bucks for the machine that I found at a salvage yard that had most of those parts in it!
Well, I found my baseplate. I made a scrap run to get rid of about
1200 pounds of accumulated aluminum scrap and get some money out of it, and saw what was for me virtually the Holy Grail Itself. A huge slab of aluminum, about the right size, and what's better, there were TWO of them!So, for 60 cents a pound, I just scored two aluminum plates, 6061 and not tooling plate, a full inch thick, milled flat on both sides, 32 inches wide by 48 inches long! They weigh 140 pounds EACH! Their size is so close to the exact size I was hoping for, it isn't even funny. I was hoping to find a piece of half inch plate, 48 by 30. That these are wider by an inch and double the thickness is fantastic.
And the sweetest part of all is that now that I've established a rapport with the person in charge of the salvage yard and she will allow me to buy stuff from them, their big shed full of stuff that's too good to scrap is now open to me! There's more big stock in there than I can shake a tree at, and the aluminum sells for 60 cents a pound!
What am I going to do with the second plate, I wonder? Well, it'd make the biggest and baddest woodworker's router table the world has ever seen, for one...! My existing CNC milled router table (16 x 22 x 7/8") is already in a class by itself, inspiring drool from every woodworker who's ever seen it. Now I get to raise the bar several notches, if I want!
Only one problem....I'm not at all sure that there's any local machine shop that can handle a full 32x48" plate for the inevitabe mods I'll have to make for it!
CJ